The Swiss Vote on Guaranteed Income Is About Rich People’s Problems

Protesters in Zurich march for a basic income for all Swiss citizens, an issue that will come to a public vote on Saturday.

PHOTOGRAPH BY ARND WIEGMANN / REUTERS

On Saturday, voters in Switzerland will go to the polls to vote on whether to give a government-guaranteed minimum income to every citizen. While organizers have tossed around a figure of twenty-five hundred Swiss francs (about the same in dollars) a month for every adult, the referendum is actually less precise. It promises only an unspecified minimum income sufficient to insure a “dignified existence.”

Switzerland is, in some ways, a very strange country to take up this issue: it has not been easy to persuade the methodical, conservative Swiss that getting a salary without working for it is a civil right. And, in fact, the overwhelming likelihood is that the referendum will go down in defeat, unless the polls are spectacularly wrong. It takes a hundred thousand signatures to put a referendum on the Swiss ballot, but many more votes to turn it into law. That said, Switzerland also already offers a strong social safety net, and, more important, the country is rich enough for its citizens to take seriously questions of how hard residents of a twenty-first-century society should work.

The idea of a minimum guaranteed national income has been floating around since the nineteen-sixties, or, if you want to go back further, to Thomas More’s “Utopia.” That it is up for an actual vote now, though, is thanks largely to the efforts of a campaign kicked off by two German-Swiss filmmakers, Enno Schmidt and Daniel Häni, who presented their ideas in a 2008 documentary called “Grundeinkommen”—literally, “base income.” The two directors call their work a “film-essay,” which is about right: it is structured as an argument, largely filled with academics explaining why an unconditional income is necessary, with Swiss citizens occasionally walking on to voice easily answered objections.

For an American, the movie makes for surprisingly compelling viewing, in large part because of what you will not see. When Americans talk about a minimum guaranteed income, they tend to focus on one of two key themes: how to deal with poverty now, and how to deal with unemployment in the future. Libertarians have homed in on an income guarantee as a low-friction, low-bureaucracy way to take care of the poor. More recently, the idea has caught on with liberals, as cash assistance has withered away and states like Kansas have made access to what remains as onerous and unpleasant as possible. That’s the poverty angle. The unemployment angle is that well-paying jobs are disappearing, either to other countries with cheaper labor or to automation, and there just won’t be enough work for everyone.

“Grundeinkommen” doesn’t deal much with poverty, though it does eventually get to the robots-will-eventually-take-the-jobs stuff. Actually, that first part is an understatement. There aren’t any poor people in “Grundeinkommen.” There is one store cashier, someone who might be considered part of the working poor in the U.S. but who, in Switzerland, where retail employees tend to be well paid, is not living in poverty. Vox’s Dylan Matthews calls basic income the “world’s simplest plan to end poverty,” but “Grundeinkommen” is not about solving the problem of poverty. It is about the problems of prosperity.

As the vote approaches, supporters of a basic income are careful to assert that having a minimal government-guaranteed income will not make people stop working. A poll commissioned by the Swiss campaign showed that a mere two per cent of workers would stop working entirely. Partly for this reason, most basic-income plans (such as one being studied in Finland, another place where the movement has gained traction) are set at a subsistence level. Schmidt and Häni’s film, on the other hand, is fairly unapologetic about admitting that, yes, if you adopt guaranteed income, some people simply won’t work. The film estimates that, under a basic-income plan, sixty per cent of workers would keep their jobs, thirty per cent would work part-time, and ten per cent would do something entirely different and not what we think of now as a regular “job.” And that’s O.K. Or better than O.K.—it’s part of the point. “The most interesting implication of the basic income,” the Swiss actress Bettina Dieterle says in the film-essay, “is that when I die I will no longer be able to say, ‘I could not do what I wanted.’ ”

This is Marxism Lite. If the unfulfilled promise of Marxism included “from each according to his ability,” Grundeinkommen is more “from each according to how much he or she feels like putting in today.” Like traditional Marxism, it suffers from problems of credibility, and, like other grand welfare schemes, from issues of expense.

On the credibility front, the film is honest enough to directly raise the question of who would do the unwanted hard work that is neither well paid nor appreciated. But the film gives only vague answers about paying more or finding new ways to organize work. As far as expense goes, the plan of paying for the basic income with a hundred-per-cent consumption tax can’t go over well in Switzerland, already one of the most expensive countries in the world. On top of all this, the Swiss referendum would confine the basic income to citizens—a neat legislative and financial sleight of hand in a country in which a quarter of the workforce consists of foreigners.

Despite all this, “Grundeinkommen” is an absorbing thought experiment for Americans, because it represents a kind of optimism that is rare, or virtually nonexistent, in U.S. economic discussions. In the United States, various basic-income ideas have gathered a degree of support among economists and policymakers, but the kind of basic income that gets discussed is a much poorer sort of dinner than the delicious Swiss version. When Americans talk about a basic income, they generally envision a more efficient or humane way to distribute welfare payments than the current alphabet soup of means-tested programs. That may well have merit as a way to eliminate the stigma of current welfare programs, and the expensive bureaucracy devoted to enforcing the rules. But it’s a long way from Grundeinkommen.

Alternatively, when they look further into the future, Americans talk about a national minimum income in the context of a jobless future, an employment apocalypse in which workers compete for fewer and fewer good jobs. Robert Reich, the former labor secretary, sees a national guaranteed income as the most likely endgame in an economy with “more and more people getting pushed out of the middle class into the personal service sector of the economy getting lower and lower wages.” When the Swiss talk about basic income, they’re talking about a utopian vision. When Americans like Reich talk about it, it’s a last bulwark against national impoverishment.

To a large degree, almost all American discussions of jobs, even after six or seven years of economic recovery, are mired in a sense of dread. Neither in the United States nor in Switzerland are taxpayers ready to pay their neighbors a comfortable salary to stay home and practice the oboe. Neither country is about to start sending out checks for twenty-five hundred dollars (or francs).

But there remains a great difference in outlook. The Swiss, citizens of the world’s fifth-richest country, are going to vote Saturday on whether they are wealthy enough to subsidize their neighbors’ leisure with a guaranteed salary. They are debating whether they should work less. On the other hand, in the United States, the world’s tenth-richest country, the election-year discussion of the economy is almost entirely about how the country can create enough work to go around.